The Featherbed Company Knysna

Featherbed Nature Reserve

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Featherbed is flourishing

Eighteen months - and two spring seasons - after the 2017 fire, and Featherbed is looking glorious! Our indigenous fynbos and coastal forests are flourishing like they haven’t done for ages, and the birds, the insects, and the small animals are back at work with a will.

In truth, we didn’t need to do much to ensure this success - nature has wonderful mechanisms for restoring itself after fire - but we did carry out one, vital intervention: we removed (and we’re still removing) as many of the invasive alien seedlings as we could.

Plants from other areas - trees, shrubs, grasses - will become invasive in a new environment if they don’t meet enemies there (bugs, funguses, and so on) that slow their rate of reproduction. This leaves the locally indigenous vegetation unable to compete for space, air, and water - which is exactly what happened at Featherbed, beginning in the 1960s: an Australian wattle (Acacia cyclops, which South Africans call rooikrans) established itself here, and although we’ve always had a programme of cutting them down by hand, it seemed at times that we were fighting a losing battle.

But the fires reduced about 95% of the rooikrans on the reserve to ashes - which gave us an invaluable opportunity to restart with a clean slate.

So, we hired a team of fifteen people, and they began to remove the seedlings that emerged four and six months after the fire (this is normal - the seeds can lay dormant in the soil for decades). They marked the land into plots of 900 square metres, and they pulled by hand - at times as many as 200,000 plants in a single plot - and left the carcasses where they fell in order to return the carbon to the soil.

Even as they were doing this, the fynbos (Cape macchia) began to reappear - the succulent groundcovers, the astonishingly green emerald grass (actually a sedge!), bulbs like the watsonias and the paintbrush lilies, and shrubs like the dune olives and the wild sage.

The soft, early rains that fell after the fires helped too, and the forest species - particularly the milkwoods and the candlewoods - began to resprout (many of them had been singed, but not killed), and keurboom seedlings (short-lived, indigenous pioneers that we hadn’t seen at Featherbed in generations) began to germinate.

We kept records, of course: our horticulturist catalogued the plants as they appeared, and he’s now found at least 300 species (and counting!) on our 75 hectares at the mouth of the Knysna Lagoon.

But the numbers don’t begin to tell the story of this astonishing explosion of life: you really should take a tour to see it for yourself.

The rebuilding and rehabilitation timeline - Before & After the fires of 7 June 2017

October - November 2018

July - August - September 2018

April - May - June 2018

January - Febuary - March 2018

October - November - December 2017

July - August - September 2017

7 June 2017 - The day of the Fire

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Featherbed Nature Reserve 2017Before the Fires

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Read about our eco experience and book your excursion

The Featherbed Nature Reserve, situated on the Western Head in Knysna, is the premier eco-experience on the Garden Route.

Please note children’s rates are applicable to family leisure bookings only and do not apply to school or special interest groups. Kindly enquire for our school packages via email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.